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Jewish Sabbath. After a few years their religious duties were clearly
laid down for them in several well-drawn codes.

One of the earliest of these ascetics was Amnion, who on the morning of
his marriage is said to have persuaded his young wife of the superior
holiness of a single life, and to have agreed with her that they should
devote themselves apart to the honour of God in the desert. But, in thus
avoiding the pleasures, the duties, and the temptations of the world,
Amnion lost many of the virtues and even the decencies of society; he
never washed himself, or changed his garments, because he thought it
wrong for a religious man even to see himself undressed; and when he had
occasion to cross a canal, his biographer tells us that attendant angels
carried him over the water in their arms, lest, while keeping his vows,
he should be troubled by wet clothes.

In the religious controversies, whether pagan or Christian, Rome had
often looked to Egypt for its opinions; Constans, when wanting copies
of the Greek Scriptures for Rome, had lately sent to Alexandria, and
had received the approved text from Athanasius. The two countries held
nearly the same opinions and had the same dislike of the Greeks; so
when Jerome visited Egypt he found the Church holding, he said, the true
Roman faith as taught by the apostles. Under Didymus, who was then the
head of the catechetical school, Jerome pursued his studies, having
the same religious opinions with the Egyptian, and the same dislike
to Arianism. But no dread of heresy stopped Jerome in his search for
knowledge and for books. He obtained copies of the whole of Origen's
works, and read them with the greatest admiration. It is true that he
finds fault with many of his opinions; but no admirer of Origen could
speak in higher terms of praise of his virtues and his learning, of
the qualities of his head and of his heart, than Jerome uses while he
timidly pretends to think that he has done wrong in reading his works.

At this time--the end of the eleventh century after the building of the
city--the emperor himself did not refuse to mark on his Roman coins the
_happy renewal of the years_ by the old Egyptian astrological fable of
the return of the phoenix.

From the treatise of Julius Fermicus against the pagan superstitions, it
would seem that the sacred animals of the Egyptians were no longer kept
in the several cities in which they used to be worshipped, and that many
of the ol